War Tax Resistance in the Friends Journal in 2008

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
2008

After noting several years of dwindling coverage of war tax resistance in the
Friends Journal, it was a pleasant surprise to see
that the magazine devoted its March 2008 issue
to the topic.

Robert Dockhorn wrote the opening editorial. Excerpt:

Historically, many Friends have refused to participate in armed forces, and
occasionally Friends, in an organized way, have refused to pay taxes to
finance military activity. But mostly, especially in recent years, only a few
individuals, acting on the basis of individual conscience, have refused to
pay taxes that are “mixed” — i.e. where one cannot determine
which monies are funding which functions of government. These individual
Friends have sometimes received endorsement from their meetings, and on
occasion, meetings (including yearly meetings) have gone so far as to
encourage individual Friends generally to think seriously about tax
resistance.

In this issue of Friends Journal, we offer several
articles that address this subject. At the center of them is a moral dilemma:
how can those of us who are clear that our government is pursuing an immoral,
militarist course live with our consciences in the knowledge that we are
funding this activity? What is required of us? What are our
real choices? What is our most effective response? And, at
another level: are we required only to be faithful to our
consciences, and to leave the consequences in God’s hands?

For eight years — from tax year 1979 to
1986 — my wife, Roma, and I refused to pay the military portion of our
federal income tax, as calculated by Friends Committee on National
Legislation. We donated the refused amounts to various causes that we felt
were appropriate. During these years I was employed by Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting. Eventually, the
IRS
came to my employer and sought to levy my wages for the owed amounts. Much
searching resulted, and the yearly meeting, while declining to turn over the
funds, placed them in a separate account and did not hide them. Eventually,
they were attached. And in 1987, Roma and I
prayerfully considered our course, sensed that we were no longer led to this
resistance, and settled with the
IRS,
paying a substantial amount of interest and penalties. We followed a leading,
and the leading changed for us. In the entire process, we were supported and
nurtured by my monthly and yearly meeting (I am a Friend, Roma is not) — but
it was our leading, supported by meetings, not the meetings’ leading.

And that is part of the question in these articles. It is not just about what
individuals can do, and should do. It is also about what all
Friends can and should do — together. How are Friends led today?

The first war tax resistance article in the issue came from Nadine Hoover,
who told the story of Dan Jenkins’s attempt to get the courts to recognize
conscientious objection to military taxation as a right of individual
conscience that American citizens had before the enactment of the
U.S. Constitution
and that they had deliberately not relinquished by means of that document
(see ♇ 24 August 2013).

The courts weren’t buying it, and in fact found the argument so far-fetched
that they upheld a $5,000 fine against Jenkins for using legally-frivolous
arguments. Hoover thought the arguments were good enough to be worth
repeating in the Journal, however.

She noted that “nearly three dozen Quakers and other supporters” joined Jenkins when he was arguing his appeal, and she argued:

To pay war taxes or to purchase from or invest in corporate structures that
profit on war or use military might in order to secure wealth, in violation
of our religious conviction, plants a dis-ease among us. Friends’ witness is
letting our lives speak — not that we will be protected but that we are
willing to make ourselves vulnerable — knowing our faith will sustain us, set
us free, and give us joy. I have experienced this joy when I live in accord
with my conscience and faith, regardless of the apparent, temporal
consequences.

She invited “Friends who will stand before the courts and proclaim our faith…
[or] write their statements of conscience and share them with others… [or]
make the commitment to represent and/or support any Friend who is called to
this witness” to write a war tax resistance committee of the New York Yearly
meeting. She hoped that if enough Quakers began to resist, they might make a
change in the country the way the women’s suffrage movement did.

The change Hoover was hoping this would bring about was that the government
would legally acknowledge conscientious objection to military spending by
passing the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, or something along those
lines:

Quakers, Mennonites, Shakers, and others have maintained this testimony
throughout U.S.
history. Still many people today, of a wide variety of faiths, do not pay
taxes for military purposes because this action violates their essential
religious beliefs and moral convictions of conscience. Passage of this bill
by Congress would facilitate the payment of all taxes owed by these
principled people.

Perish the thought.

Hoover shared a minute from the New York Yearly Meeting, dated
April 2006:

The Living Spirit works in the world to give life, joy, peace and prosperity
through love, integrity and compassionate justice among people. We are united
in this Power. We acknowledge that paying for war violates our religious
conviction. We will seek ways to witness to this religious conviction in each
of our communities.

Then she listed off some possible “ways to witness”:

encourage your congregation to write and deliver a statement of
conscientious objection to paying for war

write a statement of conscience to include with your tax return and to
send to various other people

redirect some or all of your taxes “to an escrow account to be held in
trust for the
U.S.
government”

file more lawsuits using Jenkins’s 9th
Amendment argument

live on a below-the-tax-line income

divest from “corporations that profit from war” and invest and spend more
responsibly

“Pursue local ordinances that deny corporations recognition as persons,
and that deny recognition of corporate charters as contracts”

It was a long, rambling, repetitive, sometimes vague and random-seeming (what
did corporate charters have to do with any of this?) argument. It represents
one weird extreme of the Peace Tax Fund idea, which had come to be seen by some
supporters as an end in itself, rather than a means to a more important end.
Why do we resist paying war taxes? Because that might help us get the Religious
Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill passed!

The following article, edited by Karen A. Reixach, tried to account for how
enthusiasm for conscientious objection to military taxation had taken hold in
the New York Yearly Meeting in recent years. It began by identifying a
“movement of conscience” in much the same way that voluntaryists describe
ideal noncoercive politics, with a quote from
Jim
Corbett:

Nonviolent civil initiative by covenant communities is… the way
human beings preserve and develop society based on consent, in which the rule
of law, as distinguished from the rule of commanders, is necessarily
grounded… Civil initiative must be societal rather than organizational,
nonviolent rather than injurious, truthful rather than deceitful, catholic
rather than sectarian, dialogical rather than dogmatic, substantive rather
than symbolic, volunteer-based rather than professionalized, and based on
community powers rather than government powers.

The article hoped to describe how when individuals articulate and share their
conscientious yearnings, by means of a “statement of conscience,” they can
find like-minded souls to form a “movement of conscience” that can work
together to “act on our collective beliefs of conscience,” using the recent
activity in the New York Yearly Meeting as an example.

She described some of the minutes and reports from the Meeting that had touched
on peace and justice issues in recent years, and on the Meeting’s support for
Dan Jenkins in his court cases. Then:

In 2007 the yearly meeting’s Committee on
Conscientious Objection to Paying for War sponsored a series of conferences
in support of this growing movement of conscience. The first conference was
held at Purchase Meeting the weekend following the oral argument of Jenkins
in the Second Circuit in February 2007. The
court hearing and the conference were attended by about 35 Friends and others
from the metropolitan area and the northeast region. Out of that conference
arose two strands of action: exploring the possibility of group legal action,
and expanding the movement of conscience [PDF
illegible] step of writing a statement of conscience.

The second conference, in June 2007 at
Rochester Meeting, featured a public forum on the failure of violence that
included Robert Holmes, professor of Philosophy at University of Rochester;
Derek Brett, of Conscience and Peace Tax International; and Frederick
Dettmer, the attorney representing Daniel Jenkins. During the following day
and a half, Friends continued to consider action steps individually and in
concert with others.

The third conference was held at Flushing Meeting in
September 2007… It focused on international
venues for raising freedom of conscience issues as they apply to paying taxes
for war. A fourth conference April 2–4,
2008, is being planned; and as momentum builds, we envision more every
few months, inviting ever-widening circles of participants.

I don’t see many details there about what, if any “action steps” the conferees
decided on. Jens Braun is quoted in the article as suggesting some possible
next steps:

to develop a better theoretical understanding of pacifism and the failure
of violence, so as to share this vision more convincingly

to “explore, develop, and improve the many ways Friends can work towards
not paying for war” —

get the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill passed

try new court challenges along the lines of Dan Jenkins’s

develop and use workshops and other outreach material

to join with counterparts in other countries, for instance at international
conferences

The Yearly Meeting then issued this Minute:

To Conscientious Objectors to Paying for War Everywhere,

New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends invites you to
join us in acknowledging that paying for war violates our conviction in the
Power of the Living Spirit to give life, joy, peace and prosperity through
love, integrity and compassionate justice among people.

We call on all conscientious objectors to paying for war to state in writing
1) your belief against paying for war and the preparations for war, 2) major
influences in forming your belief, 3) how it is demonstrated by the way you
live, and 4) a request that our government recognize and accommodate our
convictions.

We ask anyone who prepares such a statement to send it to
NYYM
Committee on Conscientious Objection to Paying for War… We ask Friends to
send your statement to your monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings to record
in the minutes having received your testimony.

The thing that unnerves me is that it’s possible to read the whole article
without seeing a single reference to one of these newly enthused New York
Yearly Meetingers actually refusing to pay their taxes (except for Jenkins
himself, who put his taxes in escrow with a promise to pay them into a
government “Peace Tax Fund” once one was established). There’s lots of talk
about writing statements of conscience and holding gatherings and planning
legal strategies and contacting legislators and all that, but where is the
actual not-paying-for-war part? Of “the many ways Friends can work towards not
paying for war,” you’d think some of them might involve not paying for
war. Hopefully this just went without saying, but I worry.

A sidebar from David R. Bassett and Karen Reixach concerned the status of the
Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, and where one could look on-line to
find information about it. Another, by John Little Randall, described his
work with the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and with Conscience and
Peace Tax International.

The following article, by Jens and Spee Braun, wrote about war tax resistance
as part of (and contributing to) a larger project of living a life of
integrity, and how not-straightforward it all is. It’s a good overview of
what a typical modern American war tax resister is in for:

Are you frustrated thar the war goes on and on? Has your conscience brought
up with you the subject of not paying for war? Be careful; your conscience
can make you do things (albeit for a good cause) that can turn your life
upside down!

You don’t really want to think of refusing to pay part of your taxes to the
government, do you? For starters, no matter how you calculate the percentage
to refuse, there will always be some frustrating other formula that makes
just as much sense. You can use the FCNL percentage of the budget
going towards war, but the War Resisters League has another calculation and
number. You can refuse to pay a token amount, or you can simply not pay the
estimated 50 percent or so of the tax burden that goes to war-making, past
war debts, the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons work, and all that
spying we do. How to decide?

And then, to top it off, you have to figure what to do with the money not
going to the government! Give it to charity? Put it in an escrow account? Use
it for peaceful and life-affirming purposes at home or overseas? Of course
this problem can be avoided by living under the taxable-income level — if you
don’t mind life without all the great stuff we have nowadays.

After you make these decisions of how to go about not paying for war, have
fun telling your employer that you don’t want any funds withheld from your
paycheck and not to send any money directly to the government for you!

If you get really serious, you can take the government to court, try to
change the laws, or try to change the lawmakers. So many options!

And that is not all. Deciding to be a conscientious objector to paying for
war and setting up the mechanisms by which you put action into your
intentions is the easy part. Once you do that, you know your conscience will
have taken a few strides into your being. And with that foothold (not to
mention the knowledge and understanding you have been given for having taken
those steps), your conscience will begin to demand all manner of other
deviations from a normal daily way of living!

Here is where life gets really dicey. The problem is integrity. As your
conscience integrates one part of your life with your belief structure (and
who says they need to be integrated — people have believed one thing and done
another for as long as there have been people!), the process can turn into a
domino effect with all sorts of other areas likewise wanting to be
integrated. It becomes a terrible sacrifice.

And don’t believe those who say it is actually liberating! It is like putting
your house in order: once you start organizing the mess, you keep finding
other things to clean up that you didn’t even know were out of place. Take
finances. It turns out that we could all pay less in taxes,
i.e., buy fewer bombs, if we took all the deductions coming to
us. What? Well, for example, if you keep track of all that travel to Quaker
committee meetings and write down the mileage in a little book to document
the expenditure, it may be deductible.

Businesses deduct driving and lunches (and even golf games), but Quakers
seldom do. That is so because we Quakers generally are not hagglers; we want
to pay our full share of taxes to support our government as it builds roads,
keeps up national parks, and pays politicians’ salaries. We just don’t like
that uncomfortable part that goes to war. In the house-in-order analogy we
want to share our cake, but not have part of it be eaten by our neighbor the
landmine manufacturer.

You might think about something as useful and simple as your credit cards.
Who really wants to question those little pieces of plastic that make renting
cars or buying great books over the Internet so easy? Even (especially) if
you pay off your bill in full every month, there can’t be anything wrong, you
think, in using a system that would collapse if everyone were responsible,
saved their money before making purchases, paid off debts promptly, and
weren’t willing to pay usurious interest charges. In particular, don’t think
about how, if you do pay off your bill each month, the credit company
tolerates your borrowing money free of charge only because others don’t pay
up and you might not in the future. See? If you get started, who knows what
trouble you will make for yoursel£ Now you have to think about going inside
to pay cash and talking to the gas station attendant rather than swiping the
plastic card out at the pump!

Can we retain integrity in our relationship to money? Forget it! You know
very well that money is not important enough to spend precious time keeping
track of, even if some folks call it a representation of our life force.
Better to spend time on that street corner protesting the lousy war. And
heaven forbid the government would audit our finances, since we have been
occupied with the real spiritual tasks of speaking truth to power in public
places. They say money talks, but not like we can!

We’ve been told that early Friends opened their financial books to their
meeting communities. We can’t do that anymore — it’s hard enough to talk
about sex, but to talk about our money? Who can trust others that far — well,
except if the others are insurance companies, brokerage firms, or retirement
planners? We sure can’t trust our spiritual community to have the power and
scale of resources to support us in need or relieve the fears of what would
happen to us without money!

Yes, money is scary, so don’t bother pondering the irony of why fear of
getting out from under its control ends up being even scarier then being part
of a war-based society where you can believe whatever you want, as long as
you pay up. It’s not worth it — and besides, a messy house is so much more
comfortable!

The next article was by Elizabeth Boardman. She laid out the problem this way:

Among Friends, there is not much debate about whether war taxes are
problematic. Depending upon the federal budget for the year and how you count
the line items, about half of our income tax dollars will be used for the
outrageous costs of war. Thousands of our personally earned dollars will be
used to enrich the military-industrial complex, to make killers of young men
and women,. and to cause death and destruction in the world. Letting our own
money be used this way is not consistent with good stewardship, with right
sharing, with Quaker testimonies, or with Christian teachings.

The question of whether and how we can resist is much more complex. Standing
up to Goliath is possible only for the most confident David.

She mentioned a different set of anxieties than the Brauns had covered in
their piece: worries that tax resistance or protest might trigger an audit
(and then worries that such an audit might uncover math mistakes, or worse,
“convenient” errors)… worries that the accountant who helps her with her tax
forms will disapprove of her stand and maybe drop her as a client… difficulty
reconciling willingly racking up
IRS
penalties & interest with her otherwise frugal and practical economic
practices… difficulty finding the time to research and plan her tax resistance
strategy… reluctance to break the law (or to be known as a law-breaker).

In the face of things like this, Boardman recommends that prospective war tax
resisters start small: maybe with phone tax resistance, or some sort of
symbolic protest like withholding $10.40 from your taxes or supporting the
Peace Tax Fund.

She also recommended that people who resist quietly, by slipping below the
taxable income line, start making some noise about what they’re
doing — otherwise “we accomplish nothing but a sense of personal
righteousness.”

The next article in the set was by Steve Leeds. He described becoming a war
tax resister in the 1970s and 80s and then
drifting away in discouragement after the
IRS
garnished his salary for the taxes, penalties, and interest. Then:

Fifteen years later, through renewed spiritual commitment and membership in a
Friends meeting, I was led to take action with other Quakers on war tax
resistance. It began among a few of us, and that’s all it takes.

Early in 2006, my meeting began cohosting
war tax resistance gatherings with Northern California War Tax Resistance. We
urged Friends in our meeting to engage in symbolic war tax
resistance — refusing federal phone taxes, paying under protest, withholding
symbolic amounts, or living below the tax line — and letting our legislators
know about it. We found that a number of households in the meeting partook in
some form of war tax resistance, symbolic or otherwise.

Philosophically, it’s a slam dunk. No more war. Not with my dollars.

Logistically, though, it’s easy to become fixated on the mechanics and legal
aspects of war tax resistance. There’s a lot to learn and consider. My
journey, through discernment, prayer, and the support of others, led me to
focus on complex social and financial issues. Mostly, I have been confronting
my fear of the
IRS and
the insecurity of not knowing where this will lead.

For the 2006 tax year I have held back $1,040
from the
IRS
(symbolic of the
IRS
1040 form). Living with multiple feelings — fear, joy, and liberation — makes
life whole. My faith as a Quaker, striving to be nonviolent and to oppose all
wars, has led me down this path. I am sustained by the knowledge that many
Quakers throughout history have resisted paying taxes for war. When I think
that we as a faith community need to do more, I know that the we
starts with me.

So! Quite a bit of material and many perspectives there — and a great deal
of contrast in approaches between the pursuit of legal accomodation from the
New York Quakers and the cautious but deliberate war tax resistance of the
California Quakers (Boardman and Leeds were both from the San Francisco
Meeting). It had been years since the Journal
devoted that much attention to the topic, and they haven’t done so since.

The series of articles prompted a lot of discussion in the
letters-to-the-editor column of subsequent issues — some of it quite hostile
to war tax resistance.

Dennis P. Roberts noted that the Bible is full of stories of war, and that
it “establishes beyond any doubt that the performance of an army in the
field is directly correlative to the quality of the faith and spirit of
the society or nation that put it there” and that because “the heart,
faith, honor, and spirit of a nation” is best represented by “the fighting
soldier, the fighting sailor, the fighting marine, the fighting airman,”
he finds that “this nonpayment of war taxes can indeed be carried to
frivolous extremes.”

Lucinda Antrim thought that war tax resistance “contradicts the Testimony
of Community… We are, here in the
U.S., members
of the community of the United States.… I find myself agreeing, somewhat
to my surprise, with the judge’s imposition of a ‘frivolous” fine on Dan
Jenkins.” (Naomi Paz Greenberg responded that she could not understand how
this vague and unarticulated “Testimony of Community somehow nullifies our
historic Peace Testimony”.)

David Zarembka wrote in to correct “the impression that the
IRS
is as omniscient as God, all seeing, all knowing, never making a mistake
in getting the last farthing out of the helpless tax resister. Nothing
could be further from the truth.” He recounted some
IRS
blunders in his own case, and said, “I have always made sure that the cost
of the
IRS
getting funds from me exceeded any penalties and interest that they might
charge. In my 37 years of war tax resistance I am certain that I (and all
the other active war tax resisters I know as a group) have withheld much
more funds for government war-making and given them to peace organizations
than the
IRS
has ever collected, including penalties and interest. I don’t think that
this excuse should be used by Quakers as a group as a cop-out for refusing
to pay for our wars. In fact, if all Quakers in the United States were war
tax resisters, the
IRS
couldn’t even cope with our collective resistance.”

George Levinger, who said he’d been a phone tax resister in the Vietnam
War era, had soured on war tax resistance, considering it ultimately
counterproductive largely because the government succeeded in seizing the
taxes from him with penalties and interest. He suggested channeling the
resources you might otherwise use in war tax resistance “to contribute to
various sorts of peace-promoting organizations” instead.

Ruth Hyde Paine wrote in to promote the “penny poll” idea.

Gary Shuler wrote in to sing jingo bells: “As a retired military man, I
take exception to anyone who wants to use the privileges of this country
and not help to foot the cost. Many of my forefathers and yours died for
this freedom and you don’t want to pay taxes to keep it? Move! Cuba is
nice!” (Isn’t it cute that in 2008 someone
was still using the idea of tyranny in Cuba as a contrast to the
U.S. rather
than an example of it?)

For Pamela Haines, the challenge presented by war taxes seemed largely to
be a challenge to come up with good excuses not to resist them. Excerpts:

I don’t think the problem is just lack of courage, at least I hope not!
Part of the difficulty, I believe, is the extent to which we are
embedded and enmeshed in a deeply violent world. It’s not just the
portion of my tax dollars that goes to deadly warfare. It’s my computer,
the disposal of which poisons poor people in Africa and Asia. It’s my
everyday purchases from invisible corporations that destroy lives and
habitats far from mine. It’s my energy consumption that threatens the
very viability of future generations.

If war tax resistance seems too hard for most of us, what do we do if
that’s just the tip of the iceberg? Some Friends are not deterred by the
seemingly impossible and set out to disentangle themselves from the
whole mess — living below taxable level, with only the bare necessity of
purchases and a minimal carbon footprint. This may be a true calling for
some, and certainly a courageous one, but I know it’s not mine. To me
the focused goal of living a life free from complicity with
institutional violence would involve participating in another sin, that
of separation from my neighbors.

Is it better not to do a right thing, if by doing a right thing you would
be being inconsistent in not doing all possible right things?

In the April issue, Jamie K. Donaldson
explained why she gave up on trying to change the United States and left it
rather than continue to be part of its war machine. She’d contemplated tax
resistance at one point, but decided it wasn’t for her. Here’s how she
describes that decision:

I was haunted by the quote attributed to former Secretary of State Alexander
Haig: “Let them march all they want as long as they pay their taxes.”
Suddenly the television shots of millions of people in the streets protesting
the start of war lost their inspiration for me, and I wallowed in our
powerlessness to prevent it.

Haig’s cynical remark exemplified my inner struggle as well as a wrenching
and age-old moral dilemma for all Friends. Some bear it as a cross, enabling
them to continue the Lamb’s War on behalf of love, truth, and justice. Could
I, too? Alas, the contradiction of working for peace while paying for war, of
being complicit by mere participation in the
U.S. “system,”
became untenable and intolerable. I explored war tax resistance, but rejected
it because I hold the assets of my incapacitated mother and could not allow
the government to garnish money for her care to recuperate my taxes withheld.

An obituary notice for Stephanie Kennedy in the May issue mentioned her work on war tax resistance. An obituary notice for Charles Richard Johnson in the August issue called him “a dedicated war tax resister.”

an ad from the Friends Journal in
2008 pitches the Monteverde community in Costa
Rica, which was founded by American Quaker taxpatriates, as an ethical
investing opportunity and also a potentially attractive tax-break junket

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